[Nottingham] I knew I'd forget something last night (filesystems and partitions)

[Martin]

Surprised noone gave further comment on this...


On 18/05/2020 21:27, Jason via Nottingham wrote:
> Papped it all on to Ext4 and ran the first set of transfers. ~330Mbps?
> Not too shabby considering the hardware.

Good stuff!

Ya Kannae ga astrae wi ext4! :-)


> KVM and some other stuff to go and the decide on exactly how to switch
> to Containers. I was going to use Rancher, but that freaks if you use
> ".local". Portainer is an option, but I've found that clunky for upgrades.
> 
> Fun times.

Have fun!

I'll be jumping into containers sometime or other.



To summarise my use of filesystems:

ext4 for /boot;

btrfs for everything else for both SSD and HDD;

f2fs for flash media and for 1st gen (old!) SSDs.


The ext4 is for historic reasons and for easy disaster recovery;

btrfs is easily now mainstream and is good/best regardless of whether
you ever wish to use the snapshot features. It becomes a must-use for
large RAID arrays.

(RAID using mdraid and/or drbd are 'bomb-proof' but the repair/rebuild
times become unwieldy and unsafe as the arrays become ever larger...)

The only 'gotcha' for btrfs is that if you are going to use large VM
disk images or large databases, then you need to set the working
directories for those to be "chattr -C" to disable the btrfs CoW
functionality for those particular directory trees so as to avoid the
inevitable high fragmentation for CoW-ing live disk images and large
database files. What counts as 'large' is relative to your system...

btrfs has some beautiful future-proofing features that support very easy
upgrading and migration to new hardware and/or other systems.

You can convert an existing ext4 filesystem directly in place into a
btrfs filesystem, such is the inherent flexibility.


Filesystem developments to watch developing are:

the snapshots being added to f2fs;

and there is bcachefs to check out when developed further.



And then there are other fun stuff such as hadoop...


Good luck!
Martin